One rust bucket from Finland (small update)

[Kapteenikosmos]

Time for some updating. From last update I've worked for two long and hard weekends with the car other weekends I've been very busy and forced to take time away from the car.

First set of pics are from torquebox installation and subframe connector fabbing. I had to cut some of the clamping mechanism from our bender because there wasn't enough room to make the whole U shaped bend. The support on the mechanism was over 10mm thick and took over a half an hour of sweat dropping cutting but after that the sheet metal was easy to bend into right form, I used 2mm thick sheet metal(~0.079  inches).

[Kapteenikosmos]

My gf helped with the tracing of the floorboard contours and the shape was first made into plain paper and from there to cardboard. Transferring the floorboard contours into 2mm thick sheet metal was much harder than I had ever thought and after cutting it up like it had been sketched with the help of cardboard I used mayby 4 hours for trimming it into place. The other connector went in bit easier and took bit less. The whole fabbing+installation took approx 12hours or so.
Insides of the connectors were painted with 3m galvabrite (aluminium coating)

I left the rear end of the connector higher than the rear frame rail to keep the height of the connector high enough on the closest points across the floor. I might have left it bit too high because at first sight it looks bit odd. But atleast it is very stiff! Stiffness ratio of boxed tube goes in the magnitude of 3 (about width * height^3).

Last pic is after one weekend of hard work while I fixed lots of small things from the floor and got it sand blasted, cleaned up and painted. I was in hurry during that weekend that I didn't remember to take any pics during the work and I only have pics from the inside floor after it has been painted. The floor is painted with por 15.

[Street_Challenged73]

Wow, great job fabricating your own subframe connectors!!!

[SilverChally]

Nice work   You need to save the template and start making them  

[Kapteenikosmos]

  

I might post pics with measuring tape beneath them here. It probably takes some computer work to get the pics in right scale to get anything useful out from them but I'll live that to the possible end users. Anyway as we all know the floor boards differ somewhat from car to car but using the ones I used, as a crude template, might save some time. I'll take some pics from the templates in two weeks.

 

[Jacksboys]

The car is looking great.   

[Kapteenikosmos]

Ok time for some update. It's been a while from my last post and everything didn't went like I was planned. I hoped that I will get my car in atleast primer before winter but that didn't happen. One of the reasons was that my beloved grandmother (she also helped me to finance some of the challenger I'm building) died on bybass surgery at the end of july and doctor's error during surgery isn't totally ruled out. Well the sad things doesn't end there because my other grandmother (from dad's side) passed away about a week ago. That wasn't so hard because she had Alzheimer disease and she kinda slowly faded from my life during the last years.

That's probably enough for bad things. Good things are that I did get something done with the car and at the moment it is about 100% painted from the inside and also from the underside, engine bay etc. So I'm ready to shoot the primer when the winter is over. I also bought a new daily driver and got the manufacturing country right this time.

Seems like I have taken almost 150 pics from the challenger project since my last update so I'll post only few 

First two pics are from the day we picked up the car from Harbor.

Rest of the pics are from the sandblasted undercarriage (I used siphon type sand blaster and have to admit that it was a long journey) and finally got it painted too. I painted two coats of por 15 and one thick coat of " por chassis coat black". I was pretty please with the results.

Also the pics aren't in perfect chronological order.

[Kapteenikosmos]

The engine bay will not stay in chebby color and I will top coat it with plum crazy. Next set of pictures show how I did my radiator support and also how I boxed the whatever supports. No idea what they are called but I think that everyone can identify those from pics. Next in line was repairing the rear end from the repro quarterpanel skin. What I have heard is that this is common problem that the rear end shape isn't right and it shows in pics how badly it was off. Now the repro side looks about the same as the original drivers side. After I fixed the quarterpanel the rear valance panel also fit much better and it is pretty good atm.

Trunk lid looked to be in decent shape at first sight but after some sandblasting I saw that I was in trouble. After almost endless amount of welding small patches etc the trunk lid is now more or less usable.

[Street_Challenged73]

Sorry to hear about both of your grandmothers.  On a good note, awesome job with the rust repairs and replacement parts.

[Kapteenikosmos]

I warped the trunk lid a bit while welding the surface patch and my gf used some lead to get it back on shape again.

Next in schedule was the passenger side door. Mine had took a pretty big bang and the frame was rusted very badly. I bought another mangled door which had almost rust free frame and decided to make one door from two. I used most of the skin on my original door and welded it into the better frame. I did have some warpage but it could have been worse and I'm atleast somewhat satisfied. I'm using lead to cover up the deepest dings and hopefully I can smooth it all up with thin layer of mud.

The last pic on this set shows how I improvised with the drain holes for the trunk extension & quarterpanel. That is the lowest spot and it should prevent the rust it usually generates into the extension and lower quarter.

[Kapteenikosmos]

Last set is some misc pics from painting various areas of the car and boy I was relieved when I got the trunk in paint. I also poked the ice with a stick and slightly sand blasted the inside roof and it seems that I didn't do any warpage there.

[CudaDownUnder]

Hi Kapteenikosmos,

I'm very impressed with your work and your progress - keep up the good work! Please keep the updates coming and the pictures too.

In the photo below, I noticed that you (and everybody else) have surface rust on the inside of the "C" pillar. I presume that this surface rust continues down the inside of the quarter panel, under the parcel shelf, on the inner wheel wells, etc - anywhere the factory didn't paint.
Can you please tell me how you intend to tackle this rust? You can't get to all of it with sandblasting or a wire wheel/brush. What have you done with it?
I need to do the same on my car and I'm not sure how far to go...

[Kapteenikosmos]

Thanks for your comments, as far as it goes for the insides of the cpillars I'm intending to soak them with that oily stuff which is used to protect frame rails etc. In my case the surface rust shown to inside was only a tip of a very very big iceberg. I removed quarter panels from both side and small parts of the roof to get enough space to repair the cpillars. Pics are shown on our website which is very outdated but it contains some pics from the start of my restoration. You can find the pics concerning the cpillars from here:
http://www.kolumbus.fi/~w447207/challenger/gallery/MetalWork/C_pillars/index.html

While the quarterpanels were off I painted everything that was under.

[hezzel]

I like your work progress keep it up 

[SilverChally]

Looking great and I still think your crazy!  Some of that stuff I would have tossed out and never considered fixing it, but I'm sure I have alot more options over here.  Keep the progress going